Picturing Smart Growth

Visions for Sustainable Communities Across America

Cities and towns across the country are embracing smart growth as a better solution to meet the needs of their growing populations. Smart growth principles accommodate growth and development while saving open space, revitalizing neighborhoods and helping cool the planet. Just look at this vision of how smart growth concepts could help give a lifeless street new vitality in the town of Mount Pleasant, S.C.

Why Smart Growth?

Sprawling land development is devouring the American countryside at an alarming rate of 365 acres an hour, turning open land into a network of strip malls, anonymous suburbs and traffic-clogged roads. Being forced to drive everywhere contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and the warming of our planet. But some communities are choosing to develop differently, creating a more pleasing mix of homes, stores and offices and giving their residents an alternative to the car. Smart growth is about returning to the principles that once made America’s big cities and small towns great places to live.

Seeing is Believing

Using photo-editing software, the visionaries of Urban Advantage have transformed pictures of communities from all over the country to show how they could become more pleasant, walkable neighborhoods. Learn how smart growth principles could work their magic on these sample cities and towns.